The problem of stroke synchronization on CatchBob! is tackled. The player now get a visual feedback (change of color from black to the player’s color) when their writing is synchronize. Immediatly after a stroke is done attemps to synchronize it with the server are done.

2MB .mov video

Busy finalizing CatchBob! on TabletPC, polishing the details and fixing the last bugs. The first experiment lasted 13 minutes with players not understanding when they caught Bob. They caught him by luck, they said.

I noticed that some players did not give full trust to the interface. Either because they syncrhonize too fast or that not all the data are synchronized or the other players do not synchronize (one player thought it was not really necessary to do it often, because she was infering things from the others’ positions and annotations). Those factors for trust are very hard to manage in a mobile application with intermittent connectivity.

Fast animation of Red player’s screen (click to enlarge):


Fast forward on the replay tool (4MB .mov file):

Animation of the screenshots taken by player Red during a CatchBob! pre-test. (Click on the image to enlarge)

Video (10MB) of the fade out, refresh and connectivity effects on the CatchBob! interface.

Screenshot of the CatchBob! latest release.

Player A connected

Player C temporally lost his connection

A snapshot of Nicolas playing CatchBob! on Tablet PC.

A few minutes after the CatchBob project page had been online, it has been smartmobbed.

First version of CatchBob! on TablePC is almost over. Stroke, Position and Command objects are passed around using SOAP. To fullfil the task, each player has:

- a proximity sensor
- indication of the quality of the network
- the position of the other players
- the ability to receive and give directional advices/commands
- the ability to share free annotations on the map

The channels of communication can now be narrowed or broaden at ease.

My small presentation on the WiFi location-based applications developed the CRAFT is in ppt. It includes an architectural view of the systems.

We are preparing a TabletPC version for CatchBob! to broden the channel of communication with freehand drawing and writing. I now use the Placelab toolkit for spotting the beacons (does not give perfect results, but it works) and use the classes of the replay tool for the graphical interface. I am going to drop my own socket-based protocol to move to SOAP or XML-RPC for the client-server communication. Let’s see how they caliber with intermitent connectiviy-based applications.

I should also implement something to correct my horrible lefty handwritting.